The December 2, 2016 Thread
President-elect Donald Trump “inherited a complicated world when he won the election last month. And that was before a series of freewheeling phone calls with foreign leaders that has unnerved diplomats at home and abroad,” the New York Times reports.
“In the calls, he voiced admiration for one of the world’s most durable despots, the president of Kazakhstan, and said he hoped to visit a country, Pakistan, that President Obama has steered clear of during nearly eight years in office.”
You’ve all seen his call to the Pakstani President, yes? If not, here it is:
Oh God, this is an actual readout of a phone call between Trump and Pakistan's Prime Minister. via @rezhasan https://t.co/2Azj8FAmNH pic.twitter.com/RvascIjFqs
— DavidKenner (@DavidKenner) November 30, 2016
Jeet Heer at The New Republic explores boundaries of our post-truth era in Trump’s Lies Destroy Logic As Well As Truth:
At the end of a wholly persuasive refutation of Trump’s claim about actually winning the popular vote, for instance, Glenn Kessler at TheWashington Post offered this meta-analysis: “Now that Trump is on the verge of becoming president, he needs to be more careful about making wild allegations with little basis in fact, especially if the claim emerged from a handful of tweets and conspiracy-minded websites. He will quickly find that such statements will undermine his authority on other matters.
This analysis assumes that Trump wants to govern like a normal president, so that if he’s caught in untruths, he’ll face a credibility gap like the one that plagued Lyndon Johnson. What it fails to entertain is the possibility that Trump’s lies aren’t just incidental to his approach to politics but essential to it, that the president-elect sees lying as the source of his authority rather than as something that undermines it.
To be able to constantly lie and get people to accept contrary statements is, after all, an assertion of power. And it’s a type of power Trump understands all too well.
that it is untrue but also that, when combined with his other comments, it shows Trump doesn’t care about rational logic at all.
It looks like a few Republican Senators are trying to clip Paul Ryan’s wings when it comes to his plan to move forward on privatizing Medicare.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was blunt about the outlook for a major Medicare overhaul.
“I think we should leave Medicare for another day,” he said. “Medicare has solvency problems. We need to address those, but trying to do that at the same time we deal with Obamacare falls in the category of biting off more than we can chew.”…
Most Senate Republicans agreed that there was still a lot of work to do on Obamacare before the topic of Medicare changes could even come up in the Senate.
“I’m all for a kind of step-by-step approach, so let’s do one thing at a time,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told TPM. “A step-by-step approach makes a whole lot more sense as opposed to something big and comprehensive. We don’t do big, comprehensive very well here in Washington, D.C.”…
“It’s just too much to bite off,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told TPM. He added that he thought Ryan’s plan was “worthy of consideration,” but that ultimately any changes to Medicare should be considered in a bipartisan manner.
Seven senators, all of whom sit on Senate Intelligence, ask Obama to declassify more info about Russian interference in the U.S. election pic.twitter.com/GXgAoMhNHd
— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) November 30, 2016
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post tell Democrats to skip the civil war:
Trump’s narrow wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (unless they’re miraculously overturned in recounts), plus his larger victories in Ohio and Iowa, have the Democrats focused on the white working class — and on whether it’s time for “the end of identity liberalism,” the headline of a recent New York Times opinion piece by Mark Lilla, a Columbia University political philosopher.
Lilla’s New York Times essay provoked a polemical tempest. Many advocates for African Americans, gay men and lesbians, immigrants and women fear Lilla’s suggestion would lead liberals to abandon beleaguered constituencies at the very moment when they most need defending.
In fact, Lilla is right that liberalism needs to root its devotion to inclusion in larger principles and should not allow itself to be cast (or parodied) as simply about the summing up of group claims. He is also dead on when he writes: “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.” Democrats, who gave us the New Deal and empowered the labor movement, should be alarmed by the flight of the white working class.
But Lilla’s critics are right about something, too: An effort to reach out to the white working class cannot be seen as a strategy for abandoning people of color, Muslims or immigrants, or for stepping back from commitments to gender equality, or for withdrawing support for long-excluded groups. Liberalism’s very inclusiveness offers Democrats long-term advantages both in the Sun Belt and among younger voters who will own the future.
Clinton comms director Jennifer Palmieri told the Trump camp: "I would rather lose than win the way you guys did." https://t.co/k3453InoZO
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 2, 2016
First Read: “An interesting thing happened in the 2016 presidential race: There was no big fight over the politics of Medicare, seniors, and entitlements — like there was in 2010, 2012, and 2014. (The reason why was due to Donald Trump’s promise not to touch entitlements, as well as the Clinton campaign’s effort to go after Trump on temperament, not policy.)”
“But with Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress come Jan. 20, and with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s long-awaited effort to privatize/voucherize/restructure Medicare, entitlement politics are coming back… The biggest unknown, however, is whether President-elect Trump goes along with Ryan’s plans.”
Key takeaway: “Trump joining Ryan’s Medicare efforts could achieve a long-standing conservative goal, but open up the GOP to some mighty political attacks from Democrats in 2018 (including that Trump broke his promise on Medicare and entitlements). Or Trump blocking Ryan could uphold his promise on entitlements, especially with the kinds of voters who won him the election, but it would produce a significant fissure inside the GOP and conservative movement (which Democrats could still exploit). This will be one of the most important storylines to watch next year.”
Matt Bai: “The emergence of ‘fake news’ is a searing hot topic these days, as you’ve probably heard — a new, truth-free media to go with our new, truth-free politics…And the problem with cracking down on social media sites is that it’s a little like the war on drugs. You can try to stamp out the supply of garbage news, but the Web is a vast place, and as long as someone can make money off misinformation, it will always find a crack through which to seep…The answer doesn’t lie in hectoring tech companies into policing content, but rather in teaching our kids how to consume it.”
“Here’s a radical thought: If President Trump is looking for a bold and useful education initiative that might serve the incidental purpose of redeeming what’s left of his soul, media literacy would be a pretty good place to start.”
MSNBC has learned that Donald Trump has expanded his secretary of state search to Exxon executives. https://t.co/QsxL5PG8Bq
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) December 2, 2016
Nate Silver: “In the 10 states with the largest share of white voters without college degrees, Trump beat his polling average by an average of 8 percentage points — a major polling miss. But in the 10 states with the lowest share of white voters without college degrees, Clinton beat her polls by an average of 3 points (or 4 points if you count the District of Columbia as a state). Overall, the correlation between the share of white non-college voters in a state and the amount by which Trump overperformed (or underperformed) his polls is quite high.”
New: Congressional GOP in talks with health insurers about ways to shore them up after ObamaCare "repeal and delay" https://t.co/KTKc8p7WCq
— Peter Sullivan (@PeterSullivan4) December 1, 2016
So a bailout for insurance companies while the sick, elderly, poor and young can go fuck themselves literally to death. If this happens, we must burn everything down. All of it.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook acknowledged that the Clinton campaign lost the election because “younger voters, perhaps assuming that Clinton was going to win, migrated to third-party candidates in the final days of the race,” according to the Washington Post. He noted that the campaign needed to win upwards of 60% of young voters but it was able to garner something “in the high 50s at the end of the day. That’s why we lost.”
Yikes: per @williamjordann, new YouGov poll has Trump favorability way down at 40% (54% unfavorable, 40% very unfavorable). pic.twitter.com/NkoXpIl7SO
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) December 1, 2016
Vice President-elect Mike Pence told the Wall Street Journal that the incoming Trump administration “is planning a burst of activity that would take aim at the gridlock in Washington, pressing forward with its goals to overhaul the tax code, health care and immigration laws.”
He said President-elect Donald Trump “is preparing ambitious 100-day and 200-day plans aimed at fulfilling core campaign promises and jump-starting economic growth.”
Asked what might surprise voters about the Trump White House, Mr. Pence said: “I think the only thing that will surprise them is that Washington, D.C., is going to get an awful lot done in a short period of time.”
With this update:
WI: Hillary down 22,177
MI: Hillary down 10,704
PA: Hillary down 46,435
Total: 79,316 https://t.co/pcOqvSQlNz— Charles Gaba (@charles_gaba) December 1, 2016
So Hillary lost the election in those three states combined by less than 80,000 votes, and in each of those states, the Jill Stein and Gary Johnson vote was more than double the margin between Hillary and Trump. Fun times.
FWIW – I’m done with blaming third parties for Dem losses. The Green Party people have as much right to vote their conscience as anybody. Democrats just need to be better at winning elections. If winning by 1% is a loss, we need to win by 5%, and stop crying about the world being unfair.
Point taken. I am just pointing out the numbers because a lot of lefties voted for Stein or Johnson not because they are diehard third party members committed to the advancement of the Green or Libertarian Party. Rather, they did it as a protest vote. And their protest vote fucked them. And I hope they suffer in the coming years.
I know people who voted third party, the reason was always that they did not like Trump or Hilary, not that they liked or even understood what the third parties were all about. Essentially a rejection of both parties. As for Medicare and Obamacare I suspect the Republicans will declare victory after leaving most of these two programs alone for fear of reprisal. This is exactly what happened the last time they trotted out a Ryan master plan, then called a “roadmap”, people react violently and they scurry for cover.
any liberal who voted third party is an idiot.
Maybe this time and last time, but what is the plan going forward? We are not at a point in the country’s history where we can smugly declare some number of voters “idiots” and sit back and enjoy our moral and intellectual high ground.
LOL, Jason. We are at the point now where unity is easier than it was defending and uniting behind a single candidate. Purity is always a concern then. Now, we are all purists in opposition to Trump and every single thing he does. It will get hard again when we attempt to unify behind a single candidate or platform, and in those Purists once again become the enemy of the good.
Yet in 47 states a vote for a third-party candidate made no difference at all. Not to mention that much of Johnson’s vote was not from protesting Democrats but from protesting Republicans.
Gary Johnson got 1.2 million votes in 2012. He got about 4.5 million in 2016, despite being revealed as a doofus. Clinton still won by 2.5 million votes.
they were idiots nonetheless.
Getting away from the absurdly binary and reductive “Purist vs. Pragmatist” construction is perhaps a good place to start having some Left of Center unity.
“I know people who voted third party, the reason was always that they did not like Trump or Hilary…”
And yet, my sense is those people celebrated the Trump victory. “Independents” are undeclared Republicans who will sometimes vote for a DINO.
Getting away from the absurdly binary and reductive “Purist vs. Pragmatist” construction
There’s a structural reason for this, however, and ignoring that isn’t going to get you to much unity.
“And their protest vote fucked them. And I hope they suffer in the coming years.”
The law of unintended consequences.
The only way such people learn those lessons is for them to suffer the consequences of their actions. Call it tough love, individual responsibility, whatever. Elections have consequences. They weren’t inspired by Clinton. Maybe they’ll find some inspiration in the next four years. I have no sympathy for those who stayed home, who protest voted, or those who were inspired by offers of free lunches.
In the meantime, the party had better find a candidate for 2020 that can and will win. Hopefully, there will still be an America worth the effort.
If the priority is “getting things done” pragmatists will be delirious with joy at Trump’s first 100 days.
i don’t think the jill stein voters celebrated a trump victory. they just celebrated their self-righteousness, and that’s what they’re left with. and trump, of course. maybe stein’s recount bid is her way of trying to atone.
If the priority is “getting things done” pragmatists will be delirious with joy at Trump’s first 100 days.
And one of the things we may need to do is to stop giving the dishonest purists a place at our table.
Well the priority was getting good things done. It was never about just getting anything done. But I’m sure everyone knows that.
While no philosophical position is ever really the opposite of another, antonyms for pragmatic include blue-sky, idealistic, impractical, unrealistic, utopian, and visionary.
Pragmatism seeks to find practical approaches to problem solving with recognition that practicality is the consequence of critical thinking and planning that accounts for risks and constraints as well as recognizing opportunities, the objective to be seize opportunities and mitigate risks along the way.
So when someone says “break up the banks,” pragmatists ask “How?” with the expectation that there will be a plan and not just a vision.
In short, visionaries can dream a road, but they don’t get them built. That takes pragmatists.
The other thing that the dishonest purists ignore in the rush to their holier-than-thou-hood is that there will plenty of Democrats ready to signon to some of this 100 day push because they don’t want to be called obstructionists — and the dishonest purists will be sitting on their hands while this all happens.
Cassandra, let’s agree that deemphasizing “Purist vs. Pragmatist” as the most salient feature of inter-leftist relationships might be a good start.
.
…Not is this thread because Puck deserve all the scorn you care to heap on him, but in future threads.
@Dave: “The only way such people learn those lessons is for them to suffer the consequences of their actions.”
Hasn’t worked yet. Any projection on when it will start to?
@Cassandra: “one of the things we may need to do is to stop giving the dishonest purists a place at our table.”
Probably better that way. They make the crooks who run the party uncomfortable anyway.
@Cassandra: “The other thing that the dishonest purists ignore in the rush to their holier-than-thou-hood is that there will plenty of Democrats ready to signon to some of this 100 day push because they don’t want to be called obstructionists — and the dishonest purists will be sitting on their hands while this all happens.”
I don’t even know what you’re trying to say here.
First off, this isn’t about “pragmatic” vs. “purist,” because each side is a purist about one thing and not the other — our side about economics, yours about social justice.
Second, your side has no room to call others “holier-than-thou,” as your side is the one making a moral, not practical, argument. We ran under the “Stronger Together” banner, and white voters rejected it. You want to continue the same emphasis even though it failed. Who’s pragmatic again?
Third, the fact that some Democrats will go along with this minority-led government is all the evidence many of us need that the party is the wrong vehicle for the trip ahead. We’ve been tinkering under the hood for 16 years now, and we still can’t get the thing to run properly.
In short, the party’s centrists are only too happy to keep drifting ever rightward, as long as they’re standing in the new center. That’s what left the party with no power whatsoever. The Congressional leaders are all in their ’70s, ready to re-fight the wars of the ’90s some more.
The good news, of course, is that Democrats can keep raising money by opposing the GOP on social issues for years to come now. Wouldn’t want to have to change that.
“each side is a purist about one thing and not the other — our side about economics, yours about social justice.”
Not really. Just about every Democrat is on the right side of social justice issues, but many are on the wrong side of economic issues. This means “our side” never has to trade social justice for economic issues. That trade by the way is a contrived talking point that doesn’t actually exist in the Democratic world. But we do have to worry about “their side” putting economic issues too low on their list of litmus tests.
We all agree on a whole lot of this, but unfortunately we’ve lost the ability to have any perspective.
the bernie people looked like the purists before the nominations. in retrospect, they were the pragmatic ones since the hillary side did not have a wide enough appeal to win the election. going forward, the economic focus looks pragmatic. the stress on identity — at least the “purist” idea that everybody must not only obey the law relating to identity but feel it in their heart — might be worthy, but if it leads to trump it’s not pragmatic for our side. it comes off as smug, and people voted against it.
“Clinton lost because young people…..”
Shut. The. Fuck. Up. And go get a job at Starbucks and never work in politics again.
You can’t count on the young vote. Ever.
She lost because the campaign sucked. And the campaign managers should be banned from politics for life.
And why the fuck am I getting a DNC fundraising letter from Donna Brazile? Why the fuck isn’t she fired?
@anonymous “suffer the consequences ” “Hasn’t worked yet. Any projection on when it will start to?”
I am an eternal optimist that someday it will happen. Like the lady at the town hall who yelled “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Well, I remain hopeful that she will get her wish and government will get out the Medicare business. Not because I believe that it isn’t a necessary governmental function, but like this lady, simply because I believe that most people are unaware of what government does, how it affects their lives and what their lives would be like without government, whether it is the Internet or Medicare.
“She lost because the campaign sucked. And the campaign managers should be banned from politics for life.
And why the fuck am I getting a DNC fundraising letter from Donna Brazile? Why the fuck isn’t she fired?”
That all checks out. Brazile should have been banned from Democratic politics after the Gore fiasco.
On third party voting: one word for all the people casting stones: bullshit.
Gary Johnson’s impact in terms of taking votes from Clinton or Trump was examined fifty ways to Sunday by Nate Silver and others. Johnson votes came about 60-40 from Clinton/Trump. In no State, given what we know about that vote, did 20% of the Johnson vote, when added to the Stein vote, come close to making the difference. And all those useful idiots talking about him covering the spread in multiple states ignore the States that Clinton won where Johnson also covered the spread. There’s no data out there to support the idea that third parties cost Clinton the election.
A lot of people voted Libertarian in hopes of getting to 5% for Federal matching funds in 2020. In Washington, Alaska, New Mexico, and (I think) two other states, Johnson’s performance–while not enough to send the election in any particular direction–was good enough to get those state parties major party ballot status for the next four years. To the Libertarian Party, which routinely spends about $10-15 million on ballot status, that’s worth about $8 million that can be spent on candidates, not canvassing for signatures next year.
If you spend time ranting about third parties and follow DelDem’s idiotic penchant for wishing the people whose votes you could have won but didn’t should go through hell, then you’re missing the damn point.
Clinton lost the campaign, plain and simple. She failed to pile up enough votes in the strong urban areas to offset the rural areas, and her campaign ignored the danger signs in VA, PA, WI, MI etc. How do you lose firewall states when you’ve got a 2-1 money advantage? By campaigning badly.
Likewise, Trump won. That simple. He gambled on an aggressive strategy and on enough people staying home because the Clinton campaign and the MSM gave her the election with two weeks to go. Even Comey couldn’t have derailed a competent campaign if there was genuine enthusiasm for the candidate.
Quit whining about third party candidates and get to work on fighting Trump every single day from here on out, realizing that you’re not in the situation because of Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, or even “purists,” but because your candidate’s campaign screwed the pooch. Royally.
because each side is a purist about one thing and not the other — our side about economics, yours about social justice.
No.
And thanks for counting yourself on the dishonest side. I’ve been having this conversation for years — certainly the early part of the Obama administration — and I appreciate the reminder that you are never going to have enough fundamental respect for me here to just read what I write.
I was not the person here cheerleading for a recovery deal that would have cut off needed unemployment benefits just so that an extension of tax cuts would not happen. The purist who did make this argument was more concerned about counting coup against rich people — people still affected by the downturn be damned. Extending unemployment benefits while the economy is still reeling was the real economic justice here — but yet I got castigated for the “pragmatism”.
I’ve always been on your side — I just don’t mind the ball moving a few yards at a time. And the thing that I’ve *always* known is that you are not on my side. Only as it is convenient to display the appropriate liberal plumage.
So the structural problem. You aren’t going to be honest about the people who are on your own team mainly because you need the free ice cream solution.
What are you talking about? I have plenty of respect for you, and I fail to see what I’m being dishonest about.
Where your side sees race and gender, I see class. You think racial and gender interests take primacy, and I think class interests take primacy. As my evidence, I point to the female vote for Trump, cast by women for whom misogyny wasn’t a deterrent. You can find lots of evidence to support yours.
What I have found objectionable about your side at DL — and it’s more often Pandora than you expressing this — is the claim that paying attention to the Rust Belt whites automatically means throwing minorities under the bus. I’m saying that different parts of the message must be tailored to that constituency, not that we should abandon the core of the party.
If I voted my own interests — white, male, fairly well off — I’d be voting straight-ticket Republican. So I’m not voting with my class, meaning I stand as refutation of my own argument. Make of that what you will. And I certainly don’t do it to display my “liberal plumage,” of which I have very little.
But if you get one takeaway from all this, please disabuse yourself of the notion that I don’t respect you. I have tremendous respect for you. I wouldn’t spend time here if I didn’t.
PS: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. More tax revenue in exchange for ending unemployment benefits after almost two years is a trade that fits that template almost exactly. There is no room for purity at a bargaining table.
Another postmortem:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-aides-loss-blame-231215
Another, about trade, based on an actual data-based draft research paper:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/12/02/study_suggests_job_losses_to_china_helped_donald_trump_win_the_election.html
And, for emphasis, an analysis that shows Trump didn’t gain white voters so much as HIllary lost them:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_myth_of_the_rust_belt_revolt.html
“Compared with Republicans’ performance in 2012, the GOP in the Rust Belt 5 picked up 335,000 additional voters who earned less than $50,000 (+10.6 percent). But the Republicans’ gain in this area was nothing compared with the Democrats’ loss of 1.17 million (-21.7 percent) voters in the same income category. Likewise, Republicans picked up a measly 26,000 new voters in the $50–$100K bracket (+0.7 percent), but Democrats lost 379,000 voters in the same bracket (-11.7 percent).”
Ran out of time to add this, the conclusion to the second linked article:
“In short, the story of a white working-class revolt in the Rust Belt just doesn’t hold up, according to the numbers. In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000. The rest stayed home or voted for someone other than the major party candidates.
“This data suggests that if the Democratic Party wants to win the Rust Belt, it should not go chasing after the white working-class men who voted for Trump. The party should spend its energy figuring out why Democrats lost millions of voters to some other candidate or to abstention.”
So maybe the racism didn’t appeal to them as much as mixed feelings about Clinton kept them home. This was, after all, Bannon’s stated philosophy about the Trump campaigns closing efforts — he was trying to get people to stay home. It seems to have worked.
@cassandra: One last thing: I don’t count coup against rich people. I know lots of them and they run the usual gamut from wonderful people to complete jerks. I don’t envy them, because Biggie was right.
I think we should tax them more highly because, y’know, that’s where the money is. Any system has winners and losers. Capitalism is the best we’ve devised because it makes some people wealthy. Since they benefit most from the system, they should pay the most to keep it operating.